As part of a month long practice of singing to trees, I sent an email to choristas and asked them to send a photo of their favorite tree. Libby responded with humor and passion, beautifully expressing a love for trees and all our relations that so many of us share. ​ Thank you Libby!

A favorite tree?

​Completely impossible! Like picking a favorite child.

So many beloved ones - whole species and individual trees themselves, full of memories and spanning long relationships.

The photo I sent you is the mulberry at our farm. Its form is so beautiful and it’s a focal point right now since its shade is making a wonderful shady space for eating during the pandemic. It is covered in thousands of small, green fruits that will begin ripening in a few weeks. The lower branches will entertain and feed us as we stand under it chatting, picking and snacking. The upper reaches we don't even bother to climb or pick since they feed a dozen different species of birds we get to share with and watch. So, a current favorite for sure.

But the apples were blooming last week - subtly fragrant and blush pink. The huge poplars in our creekbed make me feel very young and ephemeral. There's a split sweet gum in the woods behind our house that has a tongue of wood that has healed since it originally split. I have discovered that you can pound on this wooden drumhead and make a wonderful resonant multi-toned drumming sound, though it’s hard on the hands. Then there's the persimmon tree that is the largest 'buck rub' I have ever seen. Bucks use their antlers to scrape the bark off trees marking their territories. The size of the tree corresponds to the size of the buck, and this tree is unusually large - maybe 5 inches in diameter, which means the buck is huge. It is stripped bare for more than a foot - a lasting testimony to the buck we never see. The persimmon's inner bark is brilliant orange, so this winter when we found it, the tree almost glowed with its inner secrets laid bare, a bright spot in the winter woods. There are the tiny dogwoods I have been transplanting to the edges of our woods to make a lacy collar around our clearing. The bunnies have been nibbling, so I've had to build little cages to give them a chance and they are rewarding me with little green sprouts this spring. Serviceberries, blooming before any green appears in the woods, their white blossoms floating deep in the forest, glowing in late winter, an early sign to remind us that winter will break and spring will come. A little later there are sassafras flowers - greenish yellow and unremarkable unless you know that they mean spring has settled in. And there’s the magnificent, now-huge sweetgum behind my parents house, perhaps the most enduring and constant arboreal presence in my life. The knothole that is placed perfectly for viewing from the living room window has been home to beehives and squirrels and woodpeckers over the 50 years I have been watching it.